Danival followed the teenager onto and off a bus, and down some alleys. They ended up at some kind of abandoned cafe. The glass walls of its alcove had been plastered on the inside with old paper and dead readouts. Amateur graffiti marked the outside. A crooked sign rested over the entryway. It was sunfaded and split in half: A cartoon owl in a vest, sipping espresso.

For the entire time, Danival had been constricted by his anxiety. When he tried closing his eyes, he only saw fletcher-tube-carrying gangsters breaking down the door to Xiao Lin’s apartment to end them. He wanted to put his face in his hands and cry. He didn’t want to look like a wimp next to the teenager.

Danival wanted to turn back as soon as the smell of the place hit him. There was some kind of acidic needle in the smell that drove its way up his nose directly into his brain. The kid didn’t notice so Danival followed.

The place had that vibe of a coffee shop that had to close but the staff squatted because they couldn’t afford their own apartments. The little tables and halfbars were filled with spare parts of computer gear. There were about a dozen people working silently at stations. Empty cups and snack wrappers formed barriers between each space so you could tell where the seats were.

There were owls. Danival counted four. One scuttled off a messy table and landed on a camera tripod wrapped in old socks and duct tape.

The kid leaned towards Danival. “I’ll be a minute. You can pour yourself a coffee if you know how to use the machine. Or grab a soda.”

The kid didn’t wait for Danival to respond. He went over to a woman working in full goggles. She hunched over her gear, plastered in bright stickers. She kept her hair in tight braids underneath the goggle straps.

Danival went the opposite path of the teenager and worked his way behind the serving counter. He walked to the coffee machine and pretended to look at it. He tried breathing through his teeth to filter out the smell of the place but that just put it on his tongue. He couldn’t concentrate. The pain moved like old traincars departing from his head down his spine to all his limbs with each heartbeat. Something fluttered above him and he ducked down. It was an owl. Orange spotted. It wore a vest. Just one button was enough to keep the vest on. The owl moved its mouth around not in an imitation of talking and not quite chewing gum. Danival could see a small black device in its beak. The bird blinked slowly at him.

Danival looked around the room but nobody reacted. It didn’t seem like a joke. Danival looked up at the owl. The owl looked at him. Danival swallowed saliva. The owl kept looking. Danival scanned the sodas. He found a green one but didn’t reach out to open the fridge. He didn’t see where a handle was. Before he could investigate, there was a slap on the desk behind him. He turned. It was the woman with the braids. She wore a jacket with the sleeves ripped off. It had been layered in patches and diodes. You could see cables between the jacket and her belt. The goggles rested around her neck. She was close to his age. Her green lips matched the markings on her face. Danival couldn’t tell if it was makeup or tattoo. She looked furious. Danival was ready to apologize for whatever he did to insult the owl.

“You think Yelde’s dead?”

Danival didn’t expect that.

She shook her head and put her arms out. Devices jingled with the motion.

Danival stuttered, “Her Deceased And Assist triggered. I…”

“So you saw her body?”

“No, my friend–”

“So your friend saw her body?”

“No, but we went to her apartment–”

“I’ve seen her get hit by a bus and be fine. She’s not dead.” The woman turned to the teenager. She had a soft accent. You couldn't tell if she moved to Brazil as a kid or if she only spoke Portuguese to help her parents through tech support calls. “So an empty apartment is enough evidence to say somebody’s dead?”

The teen shrugged. He walked to an open station and put on the goggles there.

She sighed. “Tianna. This is exactly what we needed today. After the fiasco with the Wei Ping backdoor…” She gazed at a corner of the cafe. Danival wondered what any of this had to do with a convenience store chain. The woman kind of moved her lips like she was practicing what she was about to say. “How long ago did you get the notification?”

“This morning.”

She said, “Look at her feeds.” She pulled up her goggles and gazed through them. Danival rolled his readout over the crumbs and stains of the counter. The woman quoted, “‘The owls don’t remember.’ ‘We are the cherubs.’ ‘One man’s trash will always be trash.’ When your conversations start sounding like song titles, you’re cooked. What was she on?” She leaned both elbows into the counter and rested her chin on her fists. The owl bounced its head up and down and chewed at the thing in its mouth. She said, “I know, Glissando.”

Danival wasn’t sure where to look or what to say.

She punched her fist into her hand. “I should have made her stop doing those processing runs. That stuff fries your brain.” Danival imagined himself cooking pancakes. The pancake in front of him had the face of a doll. It reminded him of something. He didn’t know how to make designs in pancakes. “She even mentioned how much her head hurt. It lasted for days and then…” her voice faded along with the room. There was a burning pinch at the base of Danival’s skull. How long would this headache last?

Danival said, “We had both just done a process run, actually.”

“You ran process with her?” the hacker asked.

“No, she showed me how to sign up. RecursoTec. We’d compare notes. She says I’m pretty good at it.”

“At dying?”

“I dunno.”

The hacker looked at Danival and seemed to unravel the layers in him until she got to the nucleotides that made him. It was as if all of the energy she had before, that anger and frustration, came to a sudden, organized stop. She asked, “What was the project you were working on?”

“Insulin pumps. She was going to give me a firmware hack or something.”

“Insulin pumps…” She repeated. She said, in more of a whisper to herself, “And she got you signed up to run process…”

Danival heard the Owl moving on its perch. He turned to see it looking directly at him. When Danival turned back, the woman had already returned to her station. He walked over as she put her gear on.

She knew he was in earshot. “Yelde and I had a bunch of projects we worked on together. I’m checking if she shared that mod.” Danival swallowed. His spit didn’t taste right. That’s a sign of an aneurysm, he thought. It wasn’t. “Got it. This is a pretty easy package. Huh…” Her jaw hovered open as she scrolled through something. She snapped her mouth shut, said “Well.” She put a drive next to the computer deck. It flashed to life and pulsed as the data transferred. She pulled the goggles down to her neck. She played with one of her braids and continued to scroll.

Danival couldn’t even smell the owl piss, nerd BO, and evaporated coffee. He was too focused on a new pain below both shoulder blades. It felt like a headache outside his head. There was a tunnel of pain Danival existed within that somehow did not pierce his body, but permeated his bones. He wondered if Yelde felt it? Did she leave her apartment in a rush for the clinic just to lie down somewhere on the street? People thought she was homeless and did nothing as she convulsed?

A device on the woman’s desk beeped. She picked up the drive and offered it to Danival.

“Thanks,” Danival said. He added, “So are there symptoms that tell you if the procedure went wrong?”

“From ROTCo?” She puffed air through her lips. “They have one of the highest failure rates. Period. You wouldn’t be able to tell if they swapped your brain out for a termite or turned it into congee.”

“Geez.” Danival said. “Did you see her post anything anywhere else about memories? Or immigrants?”

“Tons of immigrant stuff, pengyou. It’s almost Chinese New Year. With this administration.” She let the topic fade out.

Danival zipped the drive into his shirt pocket. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.” He didn’t know what she meant. “Well, thanks.”

She put the goggles back on and pointed gunfingers at him. “Be safe out there.” She popped some gum in her mouth.

***

The area outside the shop smelled of eggs and cooked puke. Danival felt his skull in a vice with serrated edges. He closed his eyes and pinched the arch of his nose, but that made his neck hurt. He squeezed his trapezius and felt something gnawing at his jawbone. He pressed onto his temples, hoping that a different vice would relieve the pain of the first–

A horn shrieked.

Frozen. A white blur expanding to encompass him.

He remembered being beaten down by pillows. They hit him in the face as his hand came so close to grabbing the yellow doll. It sat on a pedestal, and he was about to win. He was so close to grabbing it for his team. He was so excited, he didn’t see the other children hiding underneath the construction equipment. They hit him so hard that he fell back. The clear sky and sun rolled up before he slammed down onto the ground. Pain started at a point on the back of his head with a thunk. That didn’t hurt, but it spread as a flame igniting a pool of gasoline. It hurt in his ears, in his sinus, in the first vertebrae, his lungs spasmed, his kidneys felt like he got kicked in the balls, his tailbone screamed, his knees popped, his calves cramped, the divot in his overgrown toenail caught his sock and yanked more toenail away instead of breaking off cleanly.

The bike passed Danival without hitting him. The air blasted the sweat off his face. The sound of the horn rattled in his skull. He ran to the other side of the street and caught his breath.

The bike looked like Isabella An’s. It could have been her. She decided at the last moment not to kill her brother. If she wanted to, she would have. He thought about how she always got what she wanted. Danival decided he didn’t need Isabella’s help right now. He needed to channel her. He decided to go back to the RecursoTec office. He would hold his elbows out like her and demand to talk to a person. They’d tell him what was happening to his head. He’d get his money. With his hands in his shirt pocket, he made his way to the closest bus stop. He swallowed a bit of bile that had worked its way up his throat.